First steps with Model-Glue

During the last few days I started to get my hands dirty with the Model-Glue framework. To make a long story short: I really, really like it and from my personal point of view it is by far the easiest way to get involved with the idea of using a CF development framework I know about.I’ve alway wanted to play with Model-Glue but never found the time to do it. Last week I was forced to (as always 😉 as we wanted to setup an internal wiki for my new company. It was not too hard to decide for Ray Camden’scanvasWiki which was included in the DevNet Resource Kit 13. CanvasWiki was developed by using Model-Glue and as we wanted to extend it with authorization and full-text search and some more stuff, I needed to get an idea of Model-Glue first.

My first step was to read and understand the Model-Glue quickstart guide, which is just a great and simple way of getting an idea what Model-Glue is about. It’s pretty important that you code the examples and play with variations of the code.

After that I built some sort of tiny little app which worked fine and then started with extending canvasWiki. The amazing thing with Model-Glue is that after you understood the concepts it’s really simple to do stuff. The idea of putting a strong focus on the control flow and the way the different parts of the application are put together is just great.

Basically Model-Glue follows the principles of implicit invocation, as for example Mach II does. But Mach II provides a more complex structure and for me it seems one is more restricted in the ways doing particular things (for example how to build business logic and how to access data etc.). I was using Mach II for several smaller projects and never felt like “Wow, that’s it” or so, which I really did when developing with Model-Glue during the last days. Model-Glue was more of a fireworks of ideas like “Hey, cool – that works – and now I could do that and try this…” I was just having a lot of fun by dealing with it.

Interesting is the way you can access your business logic and data access, as you’re not really limited in how to do this. Basically you could do it however you like – more or less. I’ve seen some people using other frameworks as Tartan or building their own strucutre for that.

There are still some questions I need to get clarified. Yesterday I’ve done a brainstorming session with two of my co-workers and we came up with a list of stuff we wanna try and learn on Model-Glue. But if we got that sorted out, Model-Glue has a good chance to become one of the standard CF frameworks of ZeroOne.